Hillside
by Alinyaalethia
Summary: This is the story of Diana Blythe's time working for the Harris family at Hillside, wherein the children prove too adult and their parents to absent for life to be straightforward. Conceived of as a companion to After Ingleside it runs parallel to that story and likewise spans the inter-war years, though its plot is all its own.
1. Hillside and Its People

I have always had an absent-minded streak when it comes to sending things into the world -the characters are not mine and belong to or else are inspired by L. M. Montgomery.

This grew out of _After Ingleside_, a kind of answer to various requests for what I had done with Di. This story then, runs alongside that, so that every now and again it acknowledges the happenings of the other story, in spite of the plot being very much its own.

* * *

Hillside house, as the name implied to anyone looking at the sign on the gate, was located atop a hill that fell away sharply at one end and by degrees at the other and overlooked the sea. Longer than it was tall it seemed almost out of proportion to the hill it balanced on, dwarfed as it was by the sublimity of the landscape. Nothing about it was usual, not the shape of the house, not its being made of wood, where the surrounding houses were stone –or else clapboard, not the curious second storey that was more nearly an attic, certainly not the people. Colette, who had worked in its kitchen during the last war, battling against rations while its owner, a Mr. R. Harris had battled against the Germans, could have told anyone that –did in fact tell people, and often. It was why she had come away from them, preferring instead the flat land and the sound of the sea to the steep isolation of the house and the lowing of its cattle.

Set against this report was that of Peter, who stood now at the train station awaiting the afternoon train, wondering if it should ever get in and reliably informed by the signal master that there had been a delay somewhere down the line. Nothing serious he had said, not a fatality, nothing like that, only some grazing animal or a catch failure in the actual signal itself, he had not given the details much mind. So far as Peter was concerned the people at the house on the hill were fundamentally good; perhaps they were not always happy, but had anyone been entirely that in these years just gone by? He suspected not and was entirely too practical to hold against the Harris family its idiosyncrasies. Presently the long-awaited train could be heard to whistle and then to clatter into the station.

It was not only Peter who was grateful to find the afternoon train at last reaching its destination. It had been a long journey, and as Di discovered when she got to the station, it was not to be the end of it. _Glen Notes_, when it had run the request for Mrs. R. Harris about having help, had said Burnt Church, indeed the operator, when she had rung and spoken to Mrs. R. Harris, had told her Burnt Church. Now a tall young man with snapping blue eyes, that suggested the sea when the sun was at its peak, was saying that after all, they would not go to Burnt Church, but somewhere between that and Alnwick, but that the place was registered by the censor as Burnt Church because that was the village it was nearest.

'You don't mind do you?' he said, in his funny musical way that over-exaggerated dental consonants and 'R's', though you would not have guessed at the 'R's' from that mild-mannered request.

'As long as it's somewhere,' Di had said.

'Oh yes, it's certainly that. Gyp, _allez, vein-icitte_,' said Peter, 'R's' no longer over-pronounced but only rolling, as a deeply, deeply black dog rose and trotted after him.

'You don't mind about dogs, do you?' that was the speaker again and Di assured him she did not.

'That's all right then,' and he lapsed into silence.

This, Di had discovered, as she alighted from the train, was Peter Cook. She had not been told to expect him, though he had clearly anticipated her, because he had put up his arm in greeting and said, 'you must be Miss Blythe? Mrs. Harris sent me to fetch you to Hillside.'

'However did you guess?' Di had wanted to know, because after the train, the boat and the train again, it was more than a little perplexing to be greeted so genially by a stranger. He waved the raised arm about the platform, which was how she caught the colour of his eyes, and grinned at her.

'It's not so many people as step off the train here. I _am_ right then?'

'It would be a queer conversation for us to be having if I weren't.'

'That it would. I'm Peter, and that, over there, is Gyp. We say he's our dog at Hillside, but really I think we're his people.'

Di, retracting the hand she had given him, now folded her arms and said that if he was to be 'Peter' to her then he was to have the use of her Christian name, they might as well go on as they meant to continue, and he relented. It was at this point he had told her about the geographical complications of Hillside, and they began to move towards the car. Now she put out a hand to Gyp, and he came round from the far side of Peter to walk between them.

'I don't suppose,' said Peter, as he bundled Gyp and her case into the car, 'anyone's told you very much about the house?'

'Is there very much to tell?' Di climbed in through the door he held open and pushed Gyp's wet nose away from her shoulder.

'Lie down Gyp,' said Peter laughingly, 'we're on company manners for the time being.'

'I thought I'd talked you out of those,' said Di, and this earned her a proper laugh from him, a deep throated sound that resonated somewhere in the core of the earth.

'Just as well too, as I only have everyday manners, though they do get a polish now and again, on Sundays mostly before church, when I see to my shoes. Gyp though, at least _notionally_,' as he too pushed the dog away, 'does know how to treat company. Lie down, Gyp and show Di you remember about guests. _Asseyez_.' Gyp sat.

'Funny animal,' said Peter as he started the car going, 'The children's father brought him home one evening without any kind of explanation to me, and he's good enough at herding, which is as well for him, but half the time he's only got an ear for a language I can't speak, am I right Gyp?'

Gyp, as though on cue, gave an exuberant bark and Peter reached over his shoulder to muss the dog's ears.

'I was beginning to wonder,' Di confessed, 'languages were always my Waterloo. I got through school largely by parroting what I heard. I have never quite forgiven our district school board for making me teach Latin.'

Peter shook his head. 'It's only Gyp that talks in two languages, and mostly he talks English, though he'd just soon listen to the other. But that's by the by, I was telling you about the house, was I not?'

'And the people in it. There's only so much you take away from a letter.'

'Don't I know it. I've been over working for Mr. Harris and Hillside since before Richard was so much as thought of –he's the oldest of the children and nearly five -and I've had only letters from home, and the odd call of course, but never a proper visit. There's been time to go back, I suppose, once we're the far side of autumn calving –which I won't begin on or we'll talk of nothing else –but then the war got in the way and made travelling far complicated, and even if it hadn't, I am always left with the feeling the house will dissolve if I go much further than the Saturday market. I don't suppose that will have got into the letters.'

'No,' Di said, 'it didn't particularly.'

'I don't suppose it could have done, I don't believe they realize. Well, Caro does, I think, but for different reasons.' After that they lapsed into silence broken only by Di's picking up the thread of their waylaid conversation.

'Tell me about Richard and the others then, if I'm to be so much with them,' she said.

'I don't know about _with_ them –well not with him anyway,' said Peter, grinning broadly.

'Richard's a right imp, always down among the boats and crawling in them and over them. He drives the fishers mad for being a nuisance and his father more so because he's what my own Gran would call a 'water child' and not a 'land one.' The test you know, stop me if you do, is to go down to the sea with the child and if he kneels down in the sand and brings it up by the handful he's a farmer like Adam. It's the ones that go diving headlong into the water without a thought for the rocks, the cold or the fish that have the sea in their blood, and that's Richard.

'I wonder,' said Di musingly, 'what your Gran would make of my brothers. One at least was predisposed to be one of your 'land people,' but the other was neither and still another was both.'

'Both?' and Peter seemed to ponder this conundrum for some length. 'I'll have to put that into my next letter home,' he said at last, 'but I reckon the one you say was neither had an ear tuned to heaven. There's no test for that –you have it or you haven't and not everyone has the knowing of how to tell.'

'Walter had it all right,' said Di, equal parts startled and admiring that Peter should hit so near the mark.

'Ah,' said Peter as understanding dawned, 'heaven always knows its own, doesn't it. I do rather wonder why it insists on reclaiming them so soon.' He pressed no more but defaulted again to Richard and his impishness. He sounded, Di thought as she listened to the lilting sing-song of Peter's voice, much like Jem at that age, though by all accounts the boy was dark in every particular, dark hair, skin tanned from where the sun had kissed it, and great black eyes, 'like water in a tempest' Peter said.

'His sister though –well there's two of them, and little Caro's sweet, and she looks like him, though her eyes aren't so dark, and she hasn't seen the sun more than she can help. It rained nearly all her first year into the world, so you can imagine how green the grass looked, and after, when she was old enough, they took her out and the sun went so to her head that the doctor had her in bed for two days, and her mum would give her nothing but water and broth. It was the other sister I was thinking of, Laura Lee, and she's always called by both names, never 'Laura' and certainly never 'Lee,' but always both together and the mercy is that she doesn't insist on her second name proper too, for I don't rightly remember what it is. She doesn't look a thing like brother or sister, hair like yours, marigold colour –Gran has an idiom for that but we'll not mind it now.'

'Some day you must tell me,' said Di, her curiosity peeked by this man who could make even the fiery red of her own, and seemingly Laura Lee's hair also sound bearable.

'Ah, but I won't, and you can be sure of that, it's not a thing to be talked about by me.' Di gave it up. Whatever Peter had in mind, it was obvious he would not be forthcoming about it.

'In any event, Laura Lee's enough like Richard that she's got the touch of the sprites about her, and St. Christopher suspects her of having drunk the fairy's milk some evenings, I shouldn't wonder. I suspect it myself.'

'St. Christopher?' said Di, thinking that whatever other nonsense Peter might come up with he couldn't surely mean that Hillside was housing the patron saint of travellers, or even a relic thereof.

'The cat, you'll meet him soon enough, and all the others.'

'I see. And Laura Lee, is she inclined to water or land or sky or what?'

'She's a fish; they all are except for Caro. She'll stick near you, I imagine, if you can bear to have her about.'

'I'd hardly be coming otherwise, would I?'

'No, I suppose you wouldn't at that. Mind you, their mum professes not to mind and they still ran her off her feet.'

'It's my turn not to wonder now –what little did stick was how close together those children were. There's four, is there not? Who have you missed out?'

'Who indeed,' said Peter, slowing the car so that a stoat could limp across the road. Gyp smelt rather than saw it and gave a bark of indignation that he was so confined as to be unable to chase it.

'You don't want to go after that Gyp,' said Peter soothingly, 'you'd never kill it sure, and then you'd bring it home and it would go for St. Christopher, and _then_ what would we do. No good will come of seeing off that cat. He turned up the night the Harris family came to Hillside and got in through an open window, and he's never gone from it since. It was the belief of the man that worked that farm before I did, and I'll say with him, that St. Christopher's kept the trouble out of Hillside.'

_No wonder he's called for a saint_, Di thought, though she still wasn't convinced they'd settled on the right saint. Gyp barked again as though in agreement.

'Mind you,' said Peter, 'he's the most ill-tempered cat, saint or no, that I've ever come across, and I've seen a fair few; Gran always had cats to spare.'

'He cannot possibly,' said Di with surety, 'be worse than Doctor-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde, no cat could. Susan swore he was the devil incarnate, and I'm not convinced she missed her mark.'

'Susan?' asked Peter, but Di shook her head. 'You're remembering the child you've not told me about. Susan and Ingleside will keep for another time quite easily.'

'Oh all right,' said Peter with an air of affected hurt, 'but you must promise to tell me.' Di promised accordingly. Peter was easy enough to talk to that likely she would have told him in any case, without such extraction on his part.

'That's that sorted then. Now, let me think, Richard, Laura Lee, Caro and –Paul, I've missed out Paul. Well that's understandable enough, heaven knows. He doesn't make half the noise of the other two, unless he's whistling, and he's forever up a tree.'

'I thought you had them all down as fish?' interjected Di.

'Did I? That was while I was forgetting Paul –there's a lad Richard goes about with, who jabbers away as I was having to do with Gyp, and he _is_ inclined towards water above anything else. No, they got lucky with Paul, he's the one that will manage Hillside, likely enough, when the time comes to hand it over. Richard's forever threatening to go to sea, and he's quite mad enough that I believe him; water people always strike me as a little mad, as I'm not one myself. But Paul is always up in the treetops; he's all of three but quite tall enough for it and clever enough to manage it. Then too Richard hasn't got the sense of rabbits where Paul's concerned, so he may very well have taught him what to do.'

It was on the tip of Di's tongue to ask what this tree-climbing child looked like, so that she'd know on the rare occasions she should see him, but before she could the car had gained the end of the hill it had been steadily climbing and a neat log cabin, longer than it was tall, came into view, and with it four children, two of which came pelting towards the car before it had nearly stopped, one of which hung back behind the oak ballast that held up the overhang above the low porch while another leapt, in a blur of stiff linen and copper hair, out of the crown of a beech tree, higher than he was tall, and joined brother and sister in running. Gyp, with no one to dissuade him, sat up and began barking in earnest, putting his paws to the windows of the car. Peter was preoccupied with the whirlwind that was the Harris children and so it was Di who turned and said to Gyp with great firmness, 'enough, Gyp, sit,' and found that against all odds, Gyp complied. Peter, fussing with the case in the back of the car and an over-eager Paul, dropped the case, though not the boy and said to Gyp, 'now why won't you do that for me?'

Di reached for the case as he said it, but Peter intercepted her saying, 'No, I'll see to it,' and tucked the case firmly under his unencumbered arm. 'Besides,' he said over his shoulder, 'here is Mrs. Harris come for you.'

Sure enough there was a tall auburn haired woman, who might have been slender if it weren't for the shadow of a baby beginning to shape itself. That went some way to explaining the look of the two middle children at any rate. In a moment she had both Di's hands in her own and was saying, 'oh but it's _good_ to see you –I thought you would never get here –we've been watching. Caro, Caro-love, come and see,' and she released one of Di's hands long enough to motion to the little girl still sheltering behind the post on the porch.

'Oh that's all right,' said Di, laughing a little and shaking her head, 'I'm hardly going anywhere.'

'No, but it's the gesture of it. Caroline, _vein-icitte_.' Whether it was the Acadian or the application of her full name neither woman knew, but tentatively Caroline came forward, arms hugged tightly to herself.

'There, that's better, that's a good girl,' said her mother coaxingly, even as her daughter receded behind the front of the car.

'Now,' said Mrs. Harris, turning back to Di, 'you must tell me –was your journey all right? I know it's been long enough. I thought at first I could get someone in to help without looking abroad, but what I really want is someone who can cook food without masses of paprika in –I've stockpiled enough of the language to get by but I shall never get used to the cooking.'

Di made some attempt to answer but it was rapidly becoming apparent that Mrs. Harris was one of those people who needed very little encouragement to talk. She put an arm around Caroline and began to steer her back towards the house, where Peter now stood with three impatient children, Paul still squirming under his arm.

'Poor Peter,' she said sympathetically to Di now as they walked, 'I do rather wonder what he did to deserve us –to say nothing of what good thing we did to earn him. He's remembered, even if I haven't, that the others will want to show you over the house.'

'I don't think they'll let him forget,' said Di, squinting to confirm that Richard really was lying across Peter's feet as Gyp might have done and Laura Lee not quite hanging off his neck.

'Let him go at once, all of you!' their mother called up to them. Obligingly, Peter released Paul but the others never flinched.

'Really you two, whatever is Miss. Dianna to think of you?' said Mrs. Harris, trying to reach for Laura Lee and finding herself hindered by Caroline, who now clung to Peter like a limpet. Deftly, Peter swung Laura Lee down from her perch on his shoulder.

'Here she is,' said Peter handing her over, 'now you,' to Richard, 'up you come, come on, _lève-toi_.'

Di raised her eyebrows. 'I thought you said you kept everything that wasn't English for Gyp?'

'And these ones –it's all that time by the water, Richard's inhaled the language like breathing, so of course,' as he succeeded at raising Richard to his feet, 'the others caught it off of him.'

'Is that what it is?' asked Richard's mother, wonderingly. 'Here I was thinking it was Colette, when she still cooked for us.'

'No doubt her too, Mrs. Harris,' said Peter, negotiating first the screen door and then the heavier wood one behind it, still with Di's case and hampered now by Laura Lee, who, while no longer round his neck, had seized and would not relinquish his left arm.

'Don't mind him,' said Mrs. Harris to Di, 'whatever he says, _you_ at least must call me Mimi. I've been trying and trying to tell him so for five years and never once succeeded.'

They now came to the inside of the house and Laura Lee relinquished Peter's arm for Di's, even as Richard took the one his sister rendered free, and they tugged her through the front of the house.

You must see, you must see,' they kept on saying, even as Di took in the sense of the house. It was certainly, as Peter had said, a warm house, covered all over in handiwork that must surely have been Mimi's and solid wood furniture that Di suspected of predating the house. There was one large, main room, what Di in her Redmond days would have called the 'house-space' dominated by a round varnished table and an austere fireplace, with a mantle that nearly ran the length of the room. Positioned between the two were a variety of well-covered sofas and chairs, unadorned end-tables and a long flat table made of wood rods clearly meant to hold a tea tray. At the moment it boasted an unfinished bit of tapestry and a vase of pussy willows, delphiniums and monkswood. The walls, where they were free of the mantle, were covered over in books and Di, yielding to the small hands that held hers captive, nodded to the room as she passed; yes, she thought, she had been right to come here, she would like it.


	2. Evening, a Crossword and Conversation

**Thank you as ever for the reviews. I'm glad to think somewhere there are readers who have or will come to love these characters as I do -it means more than it usually would for their being mostly my own. **

* * *

Unpacking later in the evening was severely hampered by the Harris children, who came and sat on the bed and chatted to her while she did so, reluctantly migrating from the bed to the floor while she made it up and covered it with a log cabin quilt.

'Did you make that,' they asked in chorus and Di told them no, the last blanket she had quilted had been for the children displaced by the war in Europe.

'Oh. But you do quilt, like mummy?' that was Laura Lee.

'Yes, not all the time, not so much here, I should think.'

'Why not?' Paul asked curiously.

'Because silly, mummy asked her to come for us,' his sister said unflappably.

'Did she say that?' asked Di from the recesses of a wardrobe. As she said it, St Christopher came streaking in and sought sanctity there, and Di fell on her knees to route him out. Aggrieved, he settled grimly on the windowsill, where grey and sinister he resembled nothing so much as a witch's familiar.

'And what's your latest grievance,' Di demanded of him, closing the wardrobe door and sitting down on the bed. The children took this as a sign they could do likewise and clambered up beside her.

'That means Gyp's come into the kitchen,' said a soft voice from the doorway. Caro had apparently overcome her earlier nerves and now hovered, just as St. Christopher would have done, Di suspected, undecided as to whether or not to step across the threshold of the room. Di put out an arm to her. Tentatively and clutching a rag doll to her chest in the one hand and a candle rather clumsily in the other, Caro came in and being too small to scale the height of the bed, reached up to Di, who bent over and lifted her up effortlessly, but not before setting the candle well out of harm's way.

'I see,' she said as she did so. 'And St. Christopher doesn't get on with Gyp?'

'Not at all,' said Caro, all traces of nervousness vanishing in that moment and nestling against Di. Her hair was down, having been made ready for bed by her mother, and it fell dark and massy over her shoulders, straying even to the corners of her mouth. Gently Di reached across and swept it away, and shuddered to think what damage the candle could have wrought in a moment of carelessness. It was these conflicting sensations, in Di's memory, that laid the groundwork of the bond that ever afterwards marked Caro out as specially hers.

'Peter reckons St. Christopher thinks Gyp's some sort of devil. What do you think?' Richard asked, kneading the quilt on the bed as he tried to make himself comfortable thereon.

'I don't presume to know what any creature so magnificent as your St. Christopher is or isn't thinking,' said Di, and the cat on the sill purred approval. Now Caro, her eyes drawn moth-like to the flickering flame of the candle Di had taken from her, squirmed slightly to see it and craning her neck made out the photo that rested behind it.

'Who is that?' she asked, turning her head again to Di and looking up with blue eyes wide and deep and dark as pools in a wood with no moon.

'Yes who,' asked Laura Lee eagerly.

Di lifted Caro up into her lap and impulsively reached for the photo that had so struck them. There were two, one of the family all together, dating to just after the war, with Jem looking taller than usual and dressed to go away, and Susan grimly smiling, but it was the other that had struck the children's fancy and Di knew this.

'Here, look,' Di said, holding the frame out to Caro, and the others crawled nearer, Paul laying his head on Di's shoulder to see over his older siblings.

'That's Walter,' she said to Caro, 'my brother.' It was not a good photo of him, but it was the last and most recent one she had. It showed Walter in his army khaki, smiling except for the corners of his eyes, his hands folded across his chest as if he had been unsure where to put them. The gesture made him look remarkably young, almost boyish. It had been taken in Rainbow Valley, by an inexpert Carl, and the result was that the Old Bailey House loomed threateningly in the background, throwing Walter, and presumably Jerry likewise, into shadow.

'Is he in Canada?' asked Caro, and Richard laughed.

''Course he's in Canada Caro, where else would he be?'

'Heaven,' said Di softly, setting the photograph back and wrapping her arms around Caro.

'Oh,' said Caro, instinctively snuggling against the figure of the woman who held her, being then to young to adequately express the sentiment that stirred her.

'You must miss him awfully,' said Paul, and Di turned her head to catch his eye and said, 'now and then. But not just now, not with all of you making so merry.'

_After that,_ she would journal later; _they wanted to hear all about Ingleside and Walter. Peter came in –though not Gyp, and they joined forces, would you believe it. So I told them all about Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde, and Peter said something like 'so that's how you come to speak Cat,' though _I_ t__hink__ it had more to do with that first cat of Rilla's, Jack Frost, and very likely the Manse cats too. I made the mistake of saying as much and then had to explain all about the Manse and the Merediths –you can imagine what a chore that proved, though I hardly minded. They made it up in their own way, telling me all about themselves, the house and the neighbours –though that mostly from Peter over cocoa once they had gone up to sleep. I gather that Mr. Murdock's sheep are forever slipping their pasture and I'm to watch for them because odds are if they do they'll end up in the kitchen garden and I'll know before anyone else –assuming I happen to be in the kitchen, also that Mrs. Olive Abbot hasn't got the trick of saying pleasant things, and only that of gloominess. _

_ Paul tells me his second name is 'Temple,' and he is terribly proud of this, as it was his mother's name before she married. There's a character in that name, if a writer should ever want it –a detective perhaps. Laura Lee was full of all her mother's opinions, and her visitors too –clearly she has an ear for conversations she's not meant to catch _–

There was the careful tread of a child trying not to be heard and there was Caro standing in the candlelight, rag doll exchanged for a white and grey rabbit.

'Goodness –did you come all the way through the house in the dark?' Di asked of her.

'Ye-es –I couldn't sleep,' she said plaintively, and so Di put the journal by and carried her over to the bed.

'Why not love?' she said as her mother had been used to, 'did you hear something to startle you?'

'No,' said Caro hesitantly, as though saying so would put an end to any comfort she might draw from this warm, low-ceilinged room with it's Log Cabin quilt, square windows and hook rug.

'But I'm afraid to sleep in case I dream about The Thing; it comes and it sits on my chest and then I can't breath, and, and, and…' there were so many terrifying possibilities that there seemed nothing for it but to fold back the quilt and tuck child and cuddly toy under it.

'Shall I sit by you until you sleep?' Di asked. Caro, doubly tired from spent anxiousness and natural drowsiness made an incomprehensible noise and burrowed under the quilt. Di moved to put her candle out but a little voice said, 'please no, It comes in the dark,' so Di left the candle to burn itself out. 'I'll wish you a dream then, love,' she said, as she and her sister had been used to say to one another, adding for clarification, 'a pleasant one.' Caro was asleep in minutes.

When she was sure Caro was lost to dreaming and no sooner, Di came through into the kitchen. It was a spacious room, but no less comfortable for that. It was dominated at its centre by a trestle table designed for working at rather than eating on, and all around the room were cupboards where there were not counters. In spite of this the stove was positioned awkwardly against the wall nearest her own room, almost on top of the door, so that you could not open it outward without knocking the edge of the stove, and certainly couldn't move from one room to the other while the stove was lit for fear of a fire.

'Odd,' she said as she decisively shut the door that separated the two rooms, 'earlier she seemed to be frightened of me. What's come over her?'

It was not yet nine o'clock according to the cuckoo clock on the wall and Peter was sitting at the kitchen table bent over the newspaper with abnormal acuity.

'What do you make of 'an eye without a head'*?' he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Di came and attempted to read over his shoulder, and finding him to be tackling a crossword, decided that at least made sense of the headless eyes.

' I tried with 'Potato' but no good came of it,' he added for further clarification, 'and clocks have faces but not eyes. What do you suppose it is?'

'I think you keep very little company with sewers. Try 'needle.''

'Ah!' he said with satisfaction, adding a bit sheepishly as an afterthought, 'thank-you for that. What was it you were saying about Caro –or were you?' He folded the paper into quarters and set the crossword to one side.

'Only noticing the difference between her when I arrived and this evening,' said Di, sitting down opposite him.

'Oh that,' he said, 'It wasn't you she took a fit of nerves over, don't go thinking it was. It was her mum she was being shy about; she always has been. It's a curious understanding they have between them, I've not seen the like of it before or since and don't reckon I'm likely to.'

This did nothing to enlighten Di, who, rotating the crossword to peer at the clues, said 'odd how?'

'I don't know exactly how to put it,' said Peter, laying the crossword where they could both read it.

'Let me think, 'Ned's cinder mix was withdrawn,' that will be 'rescinded,' he murmured, 'I wonder how I missed that. Caro though, where to start?'

'The beginning I think,' said Di patiently, puzzling over 'Roman or Venetian pleat used to cover eyes.'

'You may be right. And _that,_ I think, turns out to be 'blindfold' –about Caro. The trouble started with her not being able to eat anything, as far as I could make out. I remember because I was here and her father was –well he was able to go away to war even if I wasn't. How anyone ever looked at this farm and deemed it of sufficient income without him to run it I doubt even God knows, but someone as was thought to matter _did_, and they would have tried to let it run itself to if they hadn't looked at me and decided I wouldn't do for a soldier. I wouldn't have done either, I never was the sort of lad to play at being one, so that was likely just as well. Never mind all that. All I could think at the time was that someone had to milk the cows, and it wouldn't be Mrs. Harris because she was and is frightened by them, though gracious knows why, and it couldn't've been Richard because he was still to young to be minding anyone calling him so–which was the one sensible thought anyone had –about my not going that is and the milk –because as it turned out we were one of the few families who hadn't to worry over whether the stuff they were putting into their porridge was sour. But that's as may be. Mostly it mattered to us at Hillside about that milk because it was one of the few things Caro could have.'

'But why couldn't she eat?'

'I was coming to that, I was coming to that,' said Peter soothingly. 'It was something in the food that was the trouble –well not the food exactly, she wasn't on to proper food –but what she _could_ and was having, you know…' Peter turned severely pink and bent over the crossword again. 'That is –her mother was still seeing to her,' he said in a rush, 'nursing her, or trying to, and the longer she went on trying the more our Caro got to look like one of those African children you sometimes hear tell of, or see in the paper, all swollen up like she'd been filled with air. It was Colette who finally insisted we have doctor Carson in, as I remember it, and she said –Colette I mean, Mrs. Harris was never one for telling me much of anything –she said that man took one look at Caro and said, 'that child's been surviving on love and nothing else.' I wonder if he'd still say it of her…somehow it doesn't strike me that he would. But then…well I think it must have been true then because Caro was getting on for half a year or thereabouts and doctor Carson couldn't believe she hadn't died of hunger pains. Mind you,' said Peter as he pencilled in yet another clue, 'she hadn't got the hunger fur you sometimes see on children without enough food to go round, and that was something. Not that I've seen it myself,' he added, frowning and tapping impatiently at 'islets of langerhans.'

'Where are they, do you suppose?' he asked.

'In the pancreas,' said Di, not Gilbert Blythe's favourite for nothing, 'now, go on about Caro.'

'Caro. Yes –it was Gran, incidentally, and mum, that had experience of the hunger fur, not me. Gran used to tell me about it of an evening while she was spinning. She had one of those great round wheels and there was nothing better for setting her talking. I've wandered again, haven't I? I was telling you that Dr. Carson wanted Caro put onto soft food early –this from Colette by the way –he never would have said a thing like that to me, he'd have thought it not right and I'd have agreed with him very likely –and he left behind a massively complicated percentage-based recipe for feeding her and said to be careful what we gave her. It gave Coletteterrible trouble, that chart. I had a look over it for her once, reckoning it might be like one of these,' and he jabbed again at the crossword, 'but it was something else entirely, that chart, and doctor Carson's handwriting didn't help any. So she and I guessed as best we could with it, short of taking it into the chemist for an opinion. The man who had the running of that shop, you know, was an old hand at reading doctor Carson's writing, but Colette didn't want anyone else dragged into the trouble with Caro. This house was going merrily to pieces without that, so she said. It was what drove Colette out in the end, at least I think it was, those percentages and always having to watch what Caro was eating. Never have I seen anything like that table…I take it that this was another thing left out of your correspondence with Mrs. Harris?'

'She certainly didn't say anything about Caro's diet, when she wrote about the children, no,' said Di, 'but that's what I can't work out, you make it sound as if Colette had care of Caro after that –where was Mimi in all of this?'

Peter fidgeted uncomfortably with a corner of the newspaper and said to the table, 'she wasn't really –not after Colette started on those percentage tables. Mrs. Harris –Mimi –she never did bear a crisis well, and she had worked up Caro's not eating into near enough of one as to make herself half hysterical over it. If she hadn't been she might have understood that chart better than we did, or so I've often thought.'

'I see,' said Di, though without much certainty.

'No,' said Peter, smiling guilelessly and looking for all the world like a djinn with a trick tucked still up his sleeve, 'I don't know that you do and I don't see how you could –and I'm glad. You'll get to seeing soon enough and then, like as not, you'll wish you couldn't.'

Overhead the clock tolled the hour and a little bird poked its head out and quaveringly chirruped up to ten. Peter rose and crossed to the cold cupboard for the last of that day's milk.

'For the green people,' he said candidly and unconcernedly, 'and Caro and Paul too. I don't know but that it would crush them to think the milk had been forgot. It's years I've been putting it out on the well, but it's the pair of them that minds most that it's done.' So saying he set the empty milk bottle by the basin and bidding Di goodnight, went out into the dark. Di, coming through again to her own room, was relieved to find the chiming of the clock had not awakened the little girl under the quilt. She looked at her in the shadowy light that penetrated the curtains and netting both, and took in fully for the first time the smallness and paleness of this child. Noiselessly she went through the motions of getting ready for bed and sensed more than felt, when she finally climbed in beside her, Caro's hands wrapping themselves round her neck, the down of her soft toy crushed between them, somewhere in the vicinity of Di's shoulder and the little girl's dark head. Protectively she threaded an arm around Caro, indistinctly saying into the hush of the night, 'you mustn't worry, Peter's remembered about the milk, it's all right,' before joining Caro in sleep.

* * *

* The crossword clues Peter and Di puzzle out are not mine, I'm not nearly good enough at the cryptic to set one. These are variously (and will continue to be unless otherwise indicated) taken from the Telegraph and the Online Cryptic I solve.


	3. Routine, St Christopher, the Sundial

_It _is_ hard to be always keeping an eye out for what Caro eats, but Peter's right, she's a sweet creature with all the sparkle of a brook when she's at ease and it would take energy I don't have to not love her, to which end I do. _

They were long mornings at Hillside, but they bothered Di not at all, as she had always been one to get up with the world. St. Christopher came and found her that first morning, at four o'clock by the cuckoo in the kitchen. He came and sat at attention at the foot of her bed, heedless of the fact he was standing on the top of her ankles, and declaimed, as only a cat could, that it was time to get up, that is, by laying a mutilated lapwing on the coverlet.

Di, disengaged from him, dressed and wrapped round with a shawl against the chill of the house for good measure, stood still and looked the kitchen over properly, not yet ready to confront the lapwing and noticing for the first time what she had missed the other day, the reason the stove was as awkwardly placed as it was. The wall opposite gave way to a room no bigger than a standing closet and by virtue of being several degrees cooler than anywhere else, contrived to function as a cold room. Di had thought such things had gone out years ago, but this one evidently had not and was stocked with as much salted meat and other such things that a family the size of the Harris's could conceivably get through on a routine basis. St. Christopher noticed her noticing and looked hopeful.

'Not for you,' she said, receding temporarily into one of the cupboards for baking supplies and beginning to mix things together for bread.

'Though I will say for you that I can't understand why Peter says you're bad tempered.'

'Ah, I don't speak cat,' said Peter, appearing in the doorway. He grinned impishly at her in a manner that recalled little Paul and asked,'any chance of a cup of tea before I go out for the cows?' Di made no answer but put the kettle on.

'Go softly,' she said, nodding at the door opposite.

'Caro still asleep then? I thought perhaps you might have left her be there,' and he smiled properly at her this time, his eyes crinkling at the corners, picked up yesterday's crossword and turned it sideways, as though so doing would yield up the answers to any clue he had missed.

'I was worried moving her would wake her,' said Di, 'and anyway, I wouldn't have known which room was hers.'

Peter shook his head at the crossword, 'I'd have done just the same by her,' he said, 'more than the others she always strikes me as needing a little coddling. Gran would say there's a shadow over her.'

'Was she very close to Colette,' Di asked, seeing the rapid emanation of steam from the kettle and lifting it from the hob.

'Well, but that I don't know, though I wouldn't have said she was. No one was very close to Colette, she wouldn't let us be, too much fire in her as it were; she was always doing was Colette, and not so's you could get to near. Yes, fiery's the word, to be sure. Warm enough to talk to and friendly too, but not without a bit of bristling and crackle. And didn't she bolt if she thought you were too close to learning her.' Peter shook his head over the memory. 'Mind you,' he said now, 'I suppose if anyone was likely to be close to her it would be Caro, she could charm the whiskers off a cat, that one could, and no doubt sing with the angels and live to tell of it if she took a fancy to. Is that tea ready?'

'I had noticed,' she said, not deigning to answer his query about the tea. He looked at her crosswise and she gave in.

'Go on then,' she said, pouring out. 'I didn't know how strong you'd want it. My father won't go near tea unless it's stewed almost to the point of being undrinkable. I have long suspected it's why he prefers Darjeeling to any other kind of tea.'

'It can strip wood of its varnish if you let it sit too long, can't it?' said Peter grinning at her again at her and adding a modest amount of milk to his tea. His eyes flashed dangerously with the prospect of some joke and Di thought perhaps it was not only Colette who had a touch of fire about her.

'It could. Though left to his own devices I think he's sooner make up coffee, and Susan and I are agreed in not trusting it. She doesn't because it's not native to Canada –tea isn't either I know, but you try telling her that –and I won't trust anything that sees the sense in branding itself after a man who gave his soul to the devil.' Peter muttered obliquely and looked enquiringly about for sugar.

'You're as bad as Jem,' Di muttered without explanation and went to fetch it down from the cupboard.

'Don't you take tea with it in?'

'I got out of the habit,' she said to the recesses of the pantry, 'it cost a fortune if you were living on a student's allowance, even with my sister and I cribbing together for household things, and then I tried to pick it up again and couldn't.'

'No, I can imagine,' said Peter. 'Gran made me swear off of sweets altogether one year for Lent –I was about Paul's age or I should never have agreed to it –and I was a long time getting back a taste for them. I still prefer Kendal Mint cakes with a bit of chocolate on to toffee or anything like that. All the same,' and he reached out and took the sugar dish from her, 'tea's not rightly tea without a spoonful or two of sugar, leastwise not to me it isn't. Thank you,' he said now as he spooned some of the dish's contents into his cup, 'I must say you're getting the knowing of this kitchen faster than I have done, and I've had more time to try at it.'

'I couldn't feel at home until I'd got to grips with the kitchen,' said Di, sipping at her tea, 'for years I cherished cooking as the thing that was mine and held it rather close –Susan taught all of us, but I never had to try at it, and I've always found it to be relaxing. It was what I used to do all through the war when things were going wrong. We were dancing the night Belgium was invaded, but I came home and made tea. I supposed everyone must have done. Then the Marne started and I made soup, because if you picked the right sort it was fussy and I had to give it attention. Ypres began and it was fish night, zeplins flew over England and in spite of the price and scarcity of sugar I remember baking powder biscuits to have with our supper.' The cuckoo on the wall bobbed fractionally and called the half hour. Peter looked up at the bird and then at Di and shook his head.

'I believe that's the first proper thing you've told me, you know,' Peter said, and he sounded almost triumphant, 'I was beginning to think I should never learn two things together about you.'

'I haven't a sister to compete with here,' said Di, apparently to St. Christopher.

'And that makes the second thing. Have you many?'

'Two, and Nan especially is a natural talker –I'm sure I told you all of this the other evening.'

'So you did; now I come to think of it. Two sisters and three brothers and a whole host of almost-family besides, have I got it right? Still, when I think how Colette could talk a person's ear off and never notice she'd done it, and half of it incomprehensible besides, well it does make you notice the spaces in a conversation more.'

'I never notice, or I might try and fill them,' said Di, who thought that if Colette talked as much as all that it was very likely out of competition, for there seemed little chance of slipping in more than the odd word when Peter was in full spate.

'No, I don't quite mean that. Goodness knows I hear quite enough of Colette's chattering of a Sunday yet. Now I'd better go before I set a foot wrong talking on at you' said Peter, rising to go out again.

'Have you eaten?' Di asked as though he were Jem about to go off on some mad lark without breakfast. He might have been too for all the difference it would have made, he was so familiar in his treatment of her.

'I haven't time now, but I'll come in again when I've seen to the milking.'

'Yes, all right, but I'll hold you to it. It's only Caro who's got to be careful about eating. I'd better see to that lapwing St. Christopher brought in. Is that sort of thing usual with him?' Peter was by then some way down the walk but he turned back on hearing her and beamed.

'Rather. Colette nearly screamed the house down the first time he tried anything like that with her. Shall I come in for it?'

'No, you get on. I was only curious,' and so saying she went and scooped the lapwing off of the quilt and buried it in the garden, by which time Gyp was about and could be seen, a lone ribbon of darkness on an otherwise sunlit morning, so fast was he running, full tilt towards the milk parlour. It might have been that he was anxious for reunion with Peter, but Di thought it had rather more to do with the grim grey cat balanced on the windowsill overlooking the birches and aspens, swishing its tail triumphantly. If ever a cat looked pleased with himself, Di thought, coming into the kitchen and stroking St. Christopher's head absent-mindedly, Hillside's cat did then.

Peter reappeared in due course, by which time the bread was covered and rising nicely. St Christopher saw him come in and turning to Di, seemed to say, 'there's cream on the milk for me.' Accordingly she skimmed the cream from the milk and having put the majority into a creamer and thence into the cold-cupboard, she gave the remnant to St. Christopher in a saucer. This, to a cat who had only known the disgruntled ministrations of Colette, who thought like Gyp that cats were the Devil reinvented, was a miracle. As when they had been introduced, he stretched as one prostrate before Di's feet and settled to his portion of cream

'Never have I seen anyone get on with him so well before, and that I'll swear to,' Peter said. Di looked at St. Christopher and asked, 'how long has he been about, anyway? Anyone would think, to here you talk, he'd lived his whole life here, or else that you had.'

St. Christopher did not deign to answer but twitched his whiskers and tossed his head loftily before going back to the cream.

'There's no reckoning with St. Christopher' said Peter, opening cupboards at random, 'he was here before I came to be, and that was five years ago. He was here before the man I took over from arrived to, and that was an age of its own making. Come to that, he was here when Mr. Harris was a lad growing up. There's no telling that cat's age and it's no wonder Gyp thinks him kin of the devil on-account of it.' He opened another cupboard and closed it in a moment.

'What on earth,' said Di, turning again to him, 'is it you're trying to find?'

'Only oats for porridge. I thought as you had only arrived the other day –' began Peter, wandering into the cold storage.

'Even I'm unlikely to try the cold cupboard for porridge oats,' said Di, not unsmiling.

'Colette used to keep them in the cupboard by the stove,' said Caro's soft voice from the doorway.

'_Aiye_!' said Peter, whirling around, 'did I wake you, Caro?'

'Mm-no,' she said sleepily, rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hands to remove the effects of sun and sleep that lingered there.

'The sun was in my eyes.'

'There is rather a lot of it, eh _colleen_?' Peter said, sweeping Caro up into his arms.

'Not my name,' she said into his neck.

'Don't be a goose, 'course it's not your name, what a thing to suggest. Now show me where these oats are, and I can see about making us some.'

Caro squirmed in his arms until she was facing the cupboards and put her arms out towards the one she meant.

'Not that way, you'll come to harm like that,' he said, seeing she was nearly falling out of his arms with the effort of it and setting her down before going towards the cupboard. Di, who had been bringing water to boil on the stovetop, anticipated him and had the jar of oats down in a moment, and shooed Caro and Peter towards the table. Obediently they sat, or rather, Peter sat and drew Caro up into his lap. He turned the much-abused crossword over so that the sundial puzzle was uppermost and together they set to compiling all the possible words based on 2 Timothy 1:7, clearly, Di thought, as she stirred the porridge and added a touch of milk to it, this was a long-established habit. As if in confirmation, there was the sound of feet on the stairs some ways off, and then of a little body running barefoot on the wooden floor of the house.

'Really,' said Peter to the boy who appeared in the doorway, 'has no one told you how unlucky it is to go barefoot when the sun's yet rising? Do you not know you'll catch a chill that way?' Paul had the grace to look grave, but then, observing the paper and what it was they were doing his face lit up and he cried out, 'oh, how far are you in? Let me help!'

In a trice he had scrambled up onto the back of Peter's chair and was looking over his shoulder.

'You've missed out 'weave',' he said with all the promptness of a long-time participant, 'and 'pave,' and 'favour' and…'

'Half a minute you,' said Peter, mussing the boy's hair, 'there's rather a lot of words to be had out of it today. Let me write them down as we go, and leave some to Caro,' he added almost sternly for him.

'Her eyes are littler than yours, and she hasn't started on her letters yet.'

Caro leaned her head against Peter's chest gratefully; Paul might be awake, but she herself was still coming out the other side of sleep.

Paul turned round and rested his arms on the top of the chairback as he had seen Peter do.

'What do you think?' he asked Di, 'what words have you picked out?'

'I haven't had the time to look,' she told him. 'You always get up this early then?'

'Oh yes,' said Paul solemnly, as Peter guided Caro's hands over the letters and helped her to pick out 'warp' from the letters available, 'Peter always says the day starts with the sun.'

'_My _day does,' said Peter, temporarily neglecting the sundial. 'Di was helping with the crossword, Paul.'

'Oh,' said Paul, eyes wide. He had tried nobly to help Peter parse the crossword on one or two occasions but never with much success.

'Here you are,' said Di, as the cuckoo thrummed again. 'Paul, go sit down properly and have something to eat, if you're so eager to start the day, yes?'

Dutifully Paul abandoned his perch on Peter's chair and sat down properly in another.

'What about Caro?' he asked around a mouthful of porridge.

'Never mind about Caro,' said Di, unobtrusively disengaging that child from Peter. She was hardly big enough to sit at table on her own, so Di fetched down several cookbooks for her to balance on and pushed her chair up against the edge of the table, there being no evidence of a child's chair in the kitchen. She wondered how Colette had managed mealtimes and only belatedly recalled the talk of the other evening and wondered if Caro could have oats. She would write her father about it, in all probability he would have an answer for her.

* * *

By degrees they settled into a pattern. Mornings were unfailingly the same; always the little children and Peter sat and did the sundial over porridge oats and tea, cambric for Paul and none whatever for Caro. A letter had come through from Gilbert in answer to her own running, _be sure you try your Caro on orange juice; if she's been brought up on the percentage method she will be starved for things like_ _vitamins. I'll see Susan sends you a parcel of our cooking apples for a crumble just as soon as they come into their own.__ Glad to hear you're well and love as ever_, after which he had signed off. Peter, looking away from the sundial and seeing her with the letter had said, 'what have you got there? It looks like nothing so much as a prescription slip.'

'It is a prescription slip,' said Di laughing, 'or at least the back of a receipt to one,' and she wondered as she said it if it would do any good to make a parcel of letter-paper up for her father. It would not, she concluded and had filed away the information about fruit for Caro.

Later, at a more godly hour, Richard and Laura Lee would surface, he with the wildness of Tamberlane about him and she with all the polished mannerisms of one who played at being grown-up. They chattered and chirruped, nine times out of ten in English the tenth in the weird dialectical French of Burnt Church that Peter had tried to tell her only Gyp spoke, in spite of the fact that Caro's 'R's' and Richard's also, like those of Peter, were trilled in perpetuity in consequence of it. At half eight, without fail, the two older children disappeared out of the house, not quite old enough for school but bursting with the energy of the adventurous. That Richard disappeared to the harbour, Di knew. He often surfaced sunburnt and damp, smelling of salt and the sea at noon with fish of some description, lobsters that she was obliged to prepare without their knowledge, shellfish that none of them could open or else mercifully ordinary perch, but Laura Lee she was less sure of. Paul climbed up the beech and aspen trees in the garden, sitting not so high that Di couldn't spot him out the kitchen window as and when she wanted to, his ankles dangling while he sat and poured over the sun-dial puzzle's remnants, sucking on sweets and whatever fruit was in season, resurfacing unfailingly at eleven for something to eat with Peter and disappearing when he did to play shadow to that same for the duration for the interval after tea and before lunch.

If it had not been for Caro, small, darting and bird-like, determinedly striving to work at Di's side, the long and low house would have struck Di as almost eerie. She had been used to Ingleside and Rainbow Valley, both places that had redoubled with the echoes of children and failing that the sound of people talking. Hillside was no such place, save for the kitchen, especially early in the morning and all through the evenings. In-between times the house was shockingly quiet, to say it was meant to house four children and as many adults. Peter and Mr. Harris, understandably enough, were out working the fields and the cattle much of the day, she knew that, but Mimi was unlike anyone Di had before come across. She had not the steady stream of callers that her own mother had, nor could she be said to go out and visit anyone. More than once Di had gone into the house-space to give it a turning over and had found Mimi sitting there as a statue might sit, and not in the meditative way that was her sister's habit, or Walter's as had been, or even Una's now and again. Mimi sat and seemed to stare intently at nothing, unseeing and as if she were staring _through_ her point of focus. It was deeply disconcerting, Di thought, but there was nothing she could do about it. When she first discovered her so, she had tried to talk to Mimi, of the house, of the impending baby, of Colette, but all with no success. When she had put it to Peter over tea and the crossword, he had said, 'I told you she wasn't lastingly bright. She takes fits and starts of being so. I think it wears her out trying to be. So long as she wasn't actively weeping or anything –was she?'

'No,' said Di, trying to decipher ' arch suite makes ritual for masses –on a Sunday perhaps?*' with no luck. 'Has she been known to?' She must have sounded as alarmed as she had been made to feel because he said soothingly, as though talking to an injured animal, 'now and then, not often I think –its nothing to be worrying over. Don't you go minding over it. I'm so little in the house, and even less in the main of it, that maybe I'm not the person to ask. It was just something Laura Lee said once, that's all, and you know what a fancy she has for exaggerating–'Eucharist.'

'Sorry?' said Di, loosing the thread of the conversation and wondering how and when Laura Lee hand managed to exaggerate the sacrament in question –or was it the recounting of it she ha exaggerated?

'That anagram,' said Peter, tapping the clue they had been struggling over, 'it was 'on Sunday' that did it. Anyway, I wouldn't go worrying overmuch about Mrs. Harris. I expect it was only Laura Lee over-egging the pudding a little.'

'I wonder,' Di had said, her eye slipping down the list of clues and debating what could possibly begin with the 'u' of 'Eucharist,' but she did not forget so easily as that.

* * *

In the interval between dinner and bedtime then they all came together again, the children, Peter and Di, and took a meal together, this in spite of the fact the children had had their supper. But they discovered early on that there would likely be some treat on hand in the kitchen, shortbread, Victoria Sponge, Oranges and Lemons loaf, some little thing they could eat over a cup of cocoa before going to sleep. If Di wondered why it was they did not spend the time with their parents, or where it was their father seemed to go off to after supper, she did not ask. In all likelihood it was nothing and he walked over the farm before locking the house up. All the same, she was afraid of provoking another answer as disquieting as that aside about Mimi weeping. Often during what the children called the 'between-time' of the evening, as they sat at the trestle table nibbling at something sweet, they were treated to the sound of Peter fiddling, four- and five-handed reels that he threatened to teach them to dance. Other evenings Di summoned up the stories of her childhood, and it was these that established her as one of the Hillside people for the children, and Peter, not content to listen, strove competitively to outdo her with his myths of green people and forsaken castles. Still, she had been there long enough and was so much more communicative than Colette had been that they clamoured loyally for her stories of Glen St. Mary and Ingleside on the heels of Peter's music.

'Tell us again about Henry Warren's ghost,' Paul was often heard to say, even as Laura Lee pleaded for the story of the schoolmaster's bride.

'No, no, tell us about the Piper your brother saw,' Richard said eagerly one evening, and even as he was saying it, Caro, who had not been used to interject herself into these evenings when the kitchen had been manned by Colette, scrabbled awkwardly into Di's lap and said softly but determinedly, 'none of those –I want to know about your brother, properly this time.'

'Yes, said Peter, 'you did hint once there was a story there,' for she had told them only in snatches about her family an about Walter, little tastes of life on P.E. Island, which should not have felt so different from life at Hillside and yet did and was, terribly different.

'It's not a happy story that one,' she said now, pressing a further biscuit on Caro and then sending the plate round to the others, 'it wouldn't agree with your music, Peter.'

'If that's all that's wanting I shall play something suitably dreich then, shall I? Laura Lee, remind me, when was the last time you had 'the Minstrel Boy'?'

Laura Lee folded her hands under her chin and looked thoughtful. 'Before Di came, I think,' she said, looking to her brothers for answer. They made murmurs of agreement and Peter's hand was already going for the neglected instrument when Paul said, 'not that one tonight Peter, please, it's so unhappy and the wind is making such a lot of noise.'

It was wailing wonderfully, Di thought, watching in the fading September light as the aspens beyond the window bent nearly double in its bluster. Even the sea could be discerned, some way off, crashing against the shore.

'Better make it something else then,' said Peter, and so saying struck up 'Lasses of Carracastle.' It was so gay and so at odds with the weather that the children turned it into a proper reel-a-bouche, singing on nothing but consonants at such a clip as to alarm any voice instructor and impress even Colette, who had taught them to sing so. Their hands flew against the edge of the table and their feet kept time on the floor and all the while the wind wailed contrapuntally against the glass, and the request for the story of Walter was forgotten. It was easy to see, when Peter played like this, why music had always been described by Rosemary Meredith in those far-away piano lessons as 'catching.'

'You do not play only with your hands,' she had said, 'or even with your arms and your shoulders, but with all of you,' and it was just what Peter, Richard, Paul and Caro were doing. Laura Lee, though she beat out the rhythm of the music with the others, would not join them singing and Di watched her and wondered what she must do to trick her into childishness for even a moment, to make her again the excitable thing she had been the day she had first come to the house.

* * *

* This clue _is _mine, and I own I am rather proud of it. It was a challenge having to scramble a word for a clue rather than the other way around.


	4. Colette, The Children Again, Annunciata

In October many things happened at once. The first of these was that Di at last met the much talked about Colette. She had been standing at the door to the kitchen garden, meaning to call Paul in for the evening, when she caught sight of a stranger coming briskly up the garden walk, slender as a willow-wand and deftly threading her way through the aspens and birches. Di splayed her hands over her eyes to see more clearly against the sun, and the stranger, taking this to be a sign of recognition and greeting, gathered her skirt in her hand and ran with childlike glee up the walk. She looked a sight, for the hand that did not hold her skirt to her side clutched at a tasselled navy shawl reminiscent of the sort of thing Di's own mother had worn in girlhood, but whoever this was she was far to young to be one of her mother's contemporaries. She chattered a little breathlessly as she ran, '_Mon djieu*, mais ej n'ouès pas, tu as grandi…'_ and as she chatted she let go of her shawl, though not her skirt and began to gesticulate with her free hand and Di, who had heard nothing like the sound of it, not even from the French settlement children she had sometimes had the teaching of at the Lowbridge school, listened awestruck, trying to place this curious creature who spoke so quickly as to make Isabelle Huppert's delivery of later and long-away years sound slow and she manipulated her hands in such a way as to make it vastly apparent where Laura Lee had learnt the habit. It dawned on Di that this must be Colette, for who else could the Harris's know with such a predilection for the local French, and yet, at the same time, surely it could not be, for anyone less likely to be found in the Hillside kitchen as this slim-armed, willowy creature, Di could not imagine. Now she was properly before her, Di could see her better. Her figure was almost childish in its slimness; everything about her looked delicate and finely wrought; she might have vanished if you had turned her sideways she was so slender. And yet, the hand she had raised in greeting was browned with work and sun. Indeed, everything about Colette was brown, except her eyes with were the crystalline blue of the sky when the sun has not quite come through, and her dress and shawl both, which were so blue as to bring her eyes out yet more and make them still more piercing. Against the cornflower blue of her dress, she had tied a red ribbon, which only reinforced her daintiness and made her look quite simply beautiful. By this time she was practically upon Di, and seemed to see her for the first time. Consequently she stopped short with an open curiosity that agreed with her childish appearance. The hand that had held her shawl to start with came now to her mouth. She said, 'but I thought perhaps it was Laura Lee or else Mimi –your hair, it is the same colour –Marigold colour Peter would call it. Whatever must you think?'

Before Di could answer, Paul had sprung from his place of concealment in a nearby aspen and was tumbling towards her calling out, 'Colette, Colette!' and with him, appearing almost from nowhere, was Peter. He took her and held her at arm's length, in spite of Paul, who had affixed himself to her ankles –the ankles of a china shepherdess, Di couldn't help thinking –and seemed to look at her critically.

'It's been too long, _colleen_,' he was saying, and Di, receding into the kitchen to resume the washing up, smiled to think how pleased Caro would be that someone else should have Peter's catch-all endearment visited upon her.

'You _are _a sight for sore eyes. Look, Paul agrees with me. Whatever made you come? Come in, you must come in, it's our tea-time.' Introductions were clearly not a thing Peter felt to be important. He installed Colette at the trestle table and said, 'but what brings you over our way?'

'You've been away from Mass,' said Colette, talking over her shoulder and twitching those same out from under the hands that had come to rest on them, 'and the women were beginning to think you had become ill and died and the priest never thinking to put you on the prayers list. So I thought I would come out and have a look to reassure them, yes?' she gathered Paul up into her lap as she said it and began to comb out his curly hair with her fingers.

'Sit _still_, _mon p'tit_, you are kicking me, _sois gentil maintenant_.' Paul seemed to settle. Peter said, 'ah –then that explains it. You must tell them from me, _colleen_, that I haven't had the time to get away, that there's been work to get through.'

'Even on a Sunday?' clucked Collette, never ceasing the Herculean task of smoothing out Paul's hair. Peter did not answer, and Colette did not appear to expect one. She did not even pause to allow for one but went on talking. It was no wonder, Di thought as she listened, that Peter should have noticed her own pauses so much, her economic use of words.

'And where are the others, Caro, where has she gone too? She must be nearly a young lady now, no?'

'I think she's upstairs,' said Di, breaking for the first time into their _tete-a-tete_ and beginning to fill the kettle, then setting it on the stovetop to boil. St. Christopher, seeing her, withdrew from the recesses of under the oven and wound himself about her feet.

'She was complaining of an ache behind her eyes.' Colette, hearing this, made a noise halfway between a kiss and a clucking of the sort that anyone else might use to tempt a cat into being social.

'_Pauvre chou_. It is the sun; it always goes to her eyes. But Peter's manners have run away. He has left them with his cows –he is nice enough to _them,_ I know. He has not said to you who I am. What can you possibly be thinking?'

Di, who had been content to finish with the washing-up and let the other two talk, now came and sat down opposite Colette, who swept her hair, which she had worn loose, over her shoulders in one elegant wave of her arm.

'I am thinking it is good to meet you, after hearing so much about you.' Colette raised an eyebrow and tilted her head upwards to Peter, who still leaned on the back of her chair.

'_Vraiment_? All good things I hope?'

'What else?' said Peter and grinned at her.

'Oh there is no getting sense from him,' said Colette, returning her attention to Di, who was now rescuing the singing kettle, 'there never is. You must tell me. What has he been saying? He could miss the last trumpet for talking that one, and half of it what he'd call nonsense.'

'Certainly all good things,' said Di genially and Colette seemed at last to relax. She stopped fussing over Paul and began to unwrap her shawl.

'_Tien_,' she said, handing it over to Peter, 'and sit down. _Asseyez_. I shall get a stiff neck if I must look up at you to talk to you. So will Di –it is Di, isn't it? I have heard a very little about you –I should have heard more but this work of Peter's that runs even to Sundays,' and she clicked her tongue again and gestured wildly at the chair at the end of the trestle table. Peter, having folded up the shawl in all its embroidered navy finery, came and sat uneasily between them, unsure what to do in the face of the sudden convergence of two sides of his life at the kitchen table.

'That is better, _hien?_ Now you will tell me, my Careen has a headache, Paul has been climbing trees –what else –Richard is down at the water because I met him going as I cam up, what of Laura Lee?'

'You've missed her, Colette, I've an idea she's away to stay at a friend's for the evening. Am I right?' he looked to Di for confirmation. Colette was laughing as she accepted her tea.

'He is on Sunday manners now I have teased him –I am not one of the women from the church, just because I came to reassure them about you,' she said ostensibly to Di, even as she handed Peter the creamer, 'If I had been asked I should have said you had not remembered my Christian name, all those months of being called anything but. Of all the places to remember!' and she began to laugh again. It was a rich golden sound, and it made her head move just enough that her hair, lightly brown and glistening in the evening light, came forward over her shoulders again. Paul squirmed and slipped off of her lap in consequence and coming round the trestle table, looked beseechingly up at Di to entreat a biscuit from her. She rose and went to fetch it even as Peter bowed low over the table and said half seriously, '_mea culpa_, I'm not having a bit of luck this evening, am I Paul? One minute I haven't manners to speak of, with which I quite agree, I haven't, and the next I have too many.' Paul made no answer, he was happily engaged in consuming a ginger-molasses biscuit.

'Let him alone, Peter,' said Colette, shaking her hair again away from her face and sending it tumbling over her shoulders, 'it is not his fault you do not know what your are about this evening. Now tell me what I have missed. For I miss hearing about the children even if I do not miss the _brâilles_.' She gave the word its full ominous weight and Di, not understanding, did not ask for clarification, she did not want any. Long after Paul had wandered off in search of his mother and sleep they sat and talked, breaking up only when the cuckoo began to sing nine times for the hour.

_It was very odd_, Di would write later that evening, _I sat opposite her and next to him and I still couldn't tell you how they stand towards one another. She is not at all the way I pictured her –I don't think I ever troubled to picture her – but the reality is a creature who is all light and sparkle, and I think, has more than a little humour. She can almost out-talk Peter, and I don't need to tell you that takes doing. As for him, he wasn't himself all evening; he was almost quiet. He's always personable, of course, but never so curiously deferential as he was with her –it _was_ odd. I almost felt I ought to go away, and I did try, but Colette wouldn't hear of it. If she ever should call again, and I do hope she does, for I like her immensely, I must try to get her to talk to me, and perhaps unravel things a little. If that was all 'Sunday manners' then there is a blue moon this evening that the paper forgot to tell us to look for. _

The second thing of import was a letter from Gilbert that came up the hill on an implausibly sunny morning. Paul was hanging upside-down in an aspen and attempting to read a about a dark boy and wild tigers, though he held that right side up. Laura Lee was kneeling on a chair at the trestle table the better to help stir the mixture for a silver-and-gold cake, a task she took in turns with Caro. For once things felt normal and Mimi could be heard entertaining neighbours in the drawing room. It was remarkable, Di thought, unfolding the letter, the difference it made to hear the clatter of china and murmur of so many voices through in the house-space. For the first time since her coming to Hillside, the place felt and sounded like any other house. She might have been at Ingleside, or anywhere else comfortable and familial in atmosphere.

'Caro fetch the tin behind you, can you?' said Laura Lee in the heady voice she always assumed when imitating her mother. Seeing Caro would never reach the tin, which was high up on the counter, Di set down her letter and went herself for the tin to hand Caro. Dutifully she brought it back and with one eye on the little girls, Di settled to the letter, which was how she came to have to reread it to process properly it's contents.

'_Tien_,' Laura Lee was saying now, in imitation of Colette, but this too, could only go wrong, and it was Di, not Caro who held the mixing bowl steady, though Caro did set her hands atop Di's. When they had smoothed out the batter and put the cake into the oven, things seemed to calm a little and Laura Lee, soon wearying of waiting on the cake, slipped out of the kitchen. Caro retrieved paper and colouring pencils from the hall cupboard, and stretched out upon the floor, keeping up a steady stream of conversation as she did so. It was listening to Caro's musical talk of how the milk Peter had put out for the Green People the other evening had been all gone this morning, Gyp's latest conflict with St. Christopher and that sainted cat's vanquishing of his foe that Di read about her sister's children. She had since spoken to her on the long-distance, the sound of the telephone had woken her early some days ago, and they had talked, but Nan had put off her suggestion that she return home. Now in the warmth of the kitchen, she read her father's account of it, which was not much and stretched only to a double-sided receipt for a prescription to one of his Harbour Mouth patients.

_I would like nothing so much, _her father had written_, as the ability to wish it undone. It's times like this I should like to have you home again. I'm missing having you to talk to; three minutes on the long-distance doesn't begin to be enough. If I shape a plan to come and visit, will you have me? It needn't be for very long, I shouldn't like to leave your brother in charge of Glen St. Mary and the Upper Glen both for over-long in any case. Just long enough to see my Di again and be reminded what it is like to have a talk about good, solid things._

'You know I'd have you in a minute,' said Di, shaking her head at the letter, recalling all too clearly how to heart her father took a case that went wrong and how much more so he must have done when it was her sister the thing had happened to, and thinking simultaneously of her sister, of the little blue babies her father had described, how neither of them would breathe. She felt Caro's hands as they wrapped firmly around her leg. She tilted her pale little face with its wide blue eyes, 'midnight colour,' Walter would have described them, up towards Di.

'_qu'es-que tu as_?' she asked, as Colette had been used to ask her when she thought her on the edge of tears.

'What's that, Caro?' she asked, lifting the little girl up into her lap, thinking how right Peter had been when he spoke of Caro having the look of the Virgin by the Cross, steadfast and sombre.

'You looked the way mummy sometimes does,' said Laura Lee from the doorway. She had come in with quite different news, but she had shunted it to one side for the time being, her curiosity peeked

'Do I?'

'Yes,' said Laura Lee authoritatively, 'the way she always looked after –' She had been going to say 'after a baby' but then she remembered her sister and stopped in time. She pressed her hands against the back of her neck and remembered the news she had come in with. ' Louis says Richard fell off of the lobster traps in the harbour and has caught his leg under one,' she said, her body swelling with the importance of it. No sooner had she finished than St. Christopher flew in through the front window with a live chipmunk in his mouth and tried to set it lovingly down at Di's feet. She had quite as much experience of St. Christopher and dead animals as could be expected after two months of being woken to his offerings of dead songbirds and mice, but a live chipmunk was something else entirely, and it quite understandably bolted to the space under the stove and cowered there. That was the third thing of import to happen, but Di hadn't time to think of it or negotiate the awkwardness of it as it deserved, coming as it did on the heels of Laura Lee's news about her brother. Paul seeing the cat come in, swung haphazardly down from his aspen, still with his book in hand and the combined effect of all these things was to drive Gilbert's letter temporarily into the back of her mind. The chipmunk, Di supposed, could keep. She even dared to hope it would bolt when Paul came in the kitchen door, but quickly abandoned any such notion and supposed she would have to leave it until later. She had meant to telephone her father, but not this minute because there were now half a dozen things that needed doing.

'One of you,' she said, 'must go for Peter or your father and have them fetch doctor Carson, do you know where they've got to?' She was not really including Caro in these instructions because Caro knew about as much of Peter and Mr. Harris's whereabouts as she herself did, but she did press the little girl close to her for the sake of something reassuring to hold.

'Oh yes,' said Paul brightly, flushing with importance at being useful, 'Peter's seeing to a cow with a stone in her foot. Shall I fetch him?'

'Yes, do, and take Laura Lee with you, she will know where Richard is; you do, don't you love?'

Laura Lee nodded and came across the kitchen to Paul.

'And for goodness sake, go quickly both,' Di called out after them as they sprinted the length of the kitchen garden towards the place where the cattle were penned and grazing in daytime.

'You still haven't said why you look so like _maman_,' said Caro when they had gone and lapsing, as she often did in moment s of uncertainty, into the security of Colette's French.

'I'm only thinking of your brother,' said Di, rising from her chair and going to inspect the cake.

'But you looked like that _before _Laura Lee came in,' Caro insisted.

'Caro-love, fetch me the skewer can you, it's just at your elbow, yes that one, thank-you pet,' this because there was no possible other answer to make; she could not possibly tell this sombre-faced child of the blue little babies delivered into the Lowbridge Manse some weeks ago now. Caro yielded up the skewer and said only by way of explanation,

'I want to see if our cake has done.' The skewer came up clean and Di turned her concentration to extracting the cake from its tin and setting it to cool.

She was in the midst of routing the chipmunk when Peter resurfaced.

'What a tempest in a teapot those children made of it,' he said when he came in, having seen both Richard and doctor Carson and more than that, settled the former into bed with stern words and _A Child's Garden of Verses_ so that his father needn't leave off his work or Mimi abandon her company. This last felt particularly vital to Peter, company being such a rarity and making as it did, Hillside to feel like a proper home. All the same, he could not help speaking his piece out over Richard, even if it was only to Di in the sanctity of the kitchen.

'And the world with them,' he went on, almost without pausing for breath. 'Quite as if our Richard was the first boy to run amuck playing by lobster traps.'

'Was it like that?' asked Di, then on her hands and knees under the sink.

'It was rather. He'd grazed the side of his head and it _did_ bleed a fair bit, but head wounds always do and it was nothing vinegar and brown paper won't cure. As for the leg he caught under whatever it was, it's an awful colour but there's a wideness in God's mercy as the hymn goes and he's not broken it… Oh _colleen, _don't,' he added, seeing Caro hovering on the brink of tears at the possibility of her big brother bleeding badly.

'Not Colleen,' Caro said, provoked into smiling.

'You are so,' said Peter, swooping down upon her and swinging her up into his arms so that Di was forced to say, 'mind the stove won't you? It's still hot. All I need is to have doctor Carson back again for Caro –it would want more than vinegar and brown paper if you caught her on it, Peter.'

'So it would,' he said, settling Caro into his arms and leaning against the trestle table, becoming gentle again, 'though I've heard tell warm water and bicarbonate of soda do wonders for a burn. Still, we mustn't have that.' He gave Caro's temple a kiss and she laughed, so that he was provoked to follow the kiss up with, 'isn't that right, _colleen_?'

'I'm not –' Caro began but Peter laughed and tweaked her nose.

'You are a little girl, yes?' and when Caro began to assent, 'there we are then, and until you get too big –_if_ you get too big –I shall go on calling you _colleen_.'

'Enough you,' said Di distractedly, emerging from under the sink and washing her hands, 'sit still and I'll give you tea and cake, shall I?' It seemed unlikely that the chipmunk would disappear in the interval and more unlikely yet that she should succeed at catching it.

'That _is_ a thought,' said Peter, 'I ran, what with the way Laura Lee was talking, from Willow Field to the harbour expecting an emergency.'

'Well you got an invalid out of it, anyway,' said Di as she filled the kettle, 'and isn't that the run that Richard does gracious knows how many times every day? Oh _well done_ Gyp, bless you.' For Gyp had recaptured the chipmunk. Di held open the door and Gyp dutifully went out, but showed no signs of dropping the chipmunk, so pleased was he at catching it.

'Gyp,' said Peter in the deeply resonant bass he used when speaking to the dog, 'Gyp, _lasse_. Bless him but if he's not too startled at catching the thing to know what to do with it. _Lasse_ Gyp, it won't taste nice, sure it won't.' Dutifully, albeit unhappily, Gyp dropped the terrified chipmunk and trotted back into the house, where he laid down at Peter's feet. He raised imploring eyes to Di, who, if she had not been retrieving a singing kettle, might have folded her arms at the dog.

'He did just chase out a chipmunk,' said Peter, almost reasonably, and Di yielded and fetched down a saucer for Gyp with a very little tea on it.

'Will that do?' she asked, her eyebrows raised, and Caro laughed to see Gyp lapping the tea up.

'I should think so –how did it come to be indoors, anyway?'

'St. Christopher brought it in,' said Caro, accepting her slice of cake and beginning to break it into dainty pieces.

'Why on earth should he do that?' Peter asked, reaching for that morning's newspaper and beginning to inspect the crossword.

'The only solveable one on that is 8 down,' said Di, and then, 'I think he thought it was dead, he looked as surprised as we did when it sprang up and bolted.'

'I don't wonder. What in the name of goodness do you make 8 down out to be? I'm inclined to think it equally impossible.'

' 'Anglicans,' said Di, who had had all day to mull over the complexities of 'nag about fifty-one cans in back of church.'

'Gracious, so it is,' said Peter, writing it down before making a start on his cake. Caro watched them curiously, trying to break the code they seemed to be speaking in.

'And that gives some of the letters for that corner so that…how do you interpret 'you could get lost in it, may be fishy'?'

'I don't,' said Di, joining Caro and Peter at the table. She poured out tea for them, careful to give Caro only a very little and transforming it to cambric stuff as she did so. She was thoughtful a moment and then said at the same meaning as Peter, 'car-park.' They laughed. 'Or 'carp-ark,' I think it was hinting. It's one of those frightful ones that pretends not to be two words by being two things at once,' said Peter, shaking her head.

'Here, Paul,' he called out, seeing the boy hovering in the doorway, 'come in here and tell me, have you heard of a carp ark? We don't know enough about fish to trust the puzzle's got it right today.'

'No,' said Paul, 'but I can find out from Richard. Not now though –can I have cake too?'

'In you come then,' said Di, motioning him into the kitchen and rising to cut him a slice of the silver-and-gold cake.

'Richard will be all right, won't he?' Paul asked as he sat down.

'Perfectly all right. Here you are,' and Di resumed her place at the table.

Something about the cake did not take with Caro and after that Di began to keep a list of things on a page in her journal for future reference. Gilbert, responding to her petition for advice, replied, as was his way, with concision; _you are quite right to keep a list. If you can get it try her on rice flour instead of the Jenny Wren stuff that's so popular and tell me how you get on._ She did and the difference was marked.

Meantime,Richard proved an impossible patient. He was only tucked up in bed for a week but it felt longer to all concerned. Being naturally energetic, he hated being obliged to sit still and Peter was inclined to take his part, muttering over the crossword and under the sound of his fiddling that it was a madness to keep him in bed over such a little thing. Colette heard of it over tea and fussed and clucked as only she could over the boy's well-being while somehow contriving to take Peter's part and assert that every child fell prey to those lobster traps at least once in the course of growing up and now Richard had been silly enough to be victimised by them, he would take care not to do so again. Whatever Mr. Harris made of it they never found out, but Mimi was inclined to agree with Doctor Carson and in bed Richard stayed. Di tried to make it up to him by visiting upon him the comic features from the paper that he was partial too and books out of the rotating library that ran in the village, and Laura Lee could often be found sitting by him and chatting, manipulating her hands so expressively and on such a scale as to make Fay Compton or Muriel Aked look understated in their acting. Di, coming away from one such scene, in which Laura Lee had been relaying to her brother the story of St. Christopher's routing of the neighbour's dog from the kitchen garden, came into the kitchen to find Mimi pouring her heart out to Peter while he took his lunch. If it had ever been unclear to Di where Laura Lee's dramatics came from, the uncertainty would have vanished in that moment.

'…and Annunciata has written to say she is coming for Christmas,' Mimi finished grimly.

' _Who_?' asked Di, thinking she must have misheard. Peter groaned.

'You sound just as I feel, Peter,' said Mimi, pressing his hand, then turning to Di, 'the children's aunt Nancy –that is, she's called Annunciata but she quite understandably hates it and insists on 'Nancy' instead…and we _do_ call her that for the most part…'

'When she's about to hear us,' said Peter drily. 'To us Annunciata she is and ever shall be, world without end, amen,' and he crossed himself so solemnly it was all the two women could do to keep from laughing.

'Is she so very awful?' Di asked as she began to unburden the tray that had held the remnants of Richard's lunch.

'Well I don't know…She tried to make out rationing was our fault,' said Peter, even as Mimi said, 'she bossed the life out of Richard and Laura Lee the last time she was here –'

' –And nearly scalded Paul trying to bathe him,' Peter interjected. 'I wouldn't have known only he started up screaming like a banshee in consequence and Colette remembered all the words she had made an effort to forget before the children –'

'She says longer grace than the minister at harvest supper,' said Laura Lee appearing in the door and divining the tenure of the conversation.

'She had a go at Colette over her brothers not going off to fight first thing,' said Mimi and Peter muttered darkly, 'not only Colette's brothers either.'

Mimi looked alarmed, 'you never said anything, Peter,' she unbelievingly said. He shook his head and Laura Lee offered, 'she made Gyp sleep out of doors all the while she was visiting.'

'And she chased St. Christopher out of the house with the dye bucket,' finished Peter as if none of these alone was enough. 'He stayed away for a week and everyone but Annunciata came down with 'flu, except for Paul who had 'flu _and_ conjunctivitis. It was the height of a bad snowstorm and doctor Carson couldn't be sent for.'

'And now,' said Mimi heavily, 'she has written to say she is coming for Christmas, and so help me, I cannot think how to put her off.'

* * *

* 'Djieu' is of course, no way to spell the word for 'God.' I have kept it so here because it catches the idiomatic sound of the word when spoken as dialectically as Colette would have, and I couldn't think of a better way to articulate her patterns of speech to the reader. It is not the only idiosyncratic word she uses in her French either, as will probably have been noticed. But Acadian being the one variety of French I was not taught at school (they foisted almost every other variety on us) I am liable to sometimes go wrong, and if I ever have a reader who can do better than I have done, please, please, for the love of heaven and all good things, put me right. I have done my best, but more than that I cannot do without comment.


	5. New Year and Afterwards

**Thank you for all the many kind reviews I've had over this story. In Annunciata, I do, as has been inferred, owe a large debt to Mary Maria, who provided many of my favourite Ingleside moments too, and another to Margaret Drabble, who first conceived of the name. It was too glorious a thing not to borrow from her.**

* * *

'You must tell her _arien_,' said Colette to Di when she got to hear of Annunciata's impending visit one November evening. 'She has a tongue longer than one of Peter's Irish miles and she's never been told to hush.'

'I do believe she has,' said Peter, drawn into the kitchen by the sound of their talking and now grown used to the sight of them sitting together at the trestle table. For in spite of the fact that Colette could not reasonably be much older than Rilla, she and Di had talked easily and long to one another, bonded the shared sensation of what it was to be unlucky in friends, a thing they should never have come to talk if it had not been for Colette's absentminded admission one evening that she had never before encountered anything like Di's 'Race of Joseph.' They were not sitting now, but stood at the sink overlooking the garden, Di with her arms buried to the elbow in hot, soapy water and Colette with a tea towel draped elegantly over her arm, and Di thought no one else could possibly have turned that much-abused square of red-chequered cloth into anything so nearly a shawl as Colette had done.

Peter said, 'I seem to remember you tried to tell her, once.'

_'Aiye_,' said Colette, whirling around and flinging the tea towel in Peter's direction. It fell short and landed on the floor, missing Gyp by inches. Di found herself wondering who had caught the word off of whom, for surely it was too singular to have always been particular to them both.

'I am to have no secrets with you in the house. You have seen to all your animals then?'

'Aren't you glad to see me?' asked Peter, grinning broadly as he retrieved the tea towel from the floor and draping it over the counter before coming hovering at Colette's elbow.

'I can't help but feel that if it's plotting over Annunciata you're after, I might be a bit of use to you.'

'And now you're lifting thoughts out of the air, _djieu aiddons-nous tous_.'

'It was a lucky guess,' said Peter, lifting the kettle off of the hob and elbowing his way between the two women at the sink to fill it, 'after all, _colleen_, no one's been able to talk of anything else for weeks. It's getting to be so that we're quite thinking and living and breathing Annunciata's visit.'

'And you wonder at it?' said Colette not without some incredulity, stepping a little away from Peter, ostensibly for the tea towel again but cupping her elbows in her hands in such a way as to thoroughly negate the possibility of using them or it to any purpose.

'She is _haiisable._' As ever with Colette's words, it did not matter that the people who heard them only partially understood, they were expressive enough in themselves. This word came out as a hiss, Colette's over-pronounced esses, living always somewhere in the space between her front teeth, making it sound almost as if she were swearing.

'Well, perhaps not quite that,' said Peter – who had clearly learned to interpret Colette's linguistic acrobatics many moons ago –rather mildly.

'You tell me that when she is living here,' said Colette darkly, unfolding her arms, relinquishing the tea towel and beginning to fasten her blue embroidered shawl over her slight shoulders.

'Where are you off to so suddenly, _colleen_?' Peter wanted to know. 'You're not going because I won't call that awful woman hateful, surely? You of all people must know I've never liked her a bit better than you have. Here, give me that and sit down to a cup of tea –I'll feel better for it if you won't. I don't like to think of you going off cross –leastwise not over something we agree on.' All the while he had been speaking he had been ministering to Colette, first retrieving her shawl, which was now draped comically over his shoulder while he guided Colette by the elbow to the trestle table and installed her at it. Colette allowed herself to be shepherded about the kitchen and when Peter had achieved his aim he stood and looked at her critically, as if he were an artist deciding the best way to paint the scene she was part of.

'That's better,' he said and nodded. 'If that's what comes of trying to be Christian about Annunciata I'll never try it again, not in this lifetime at any rate, and that I promise. She _is_ horrible I allow, never says two words together but there's a sting in them.'

'Many stings,' averred Colette, rising up from her seat and then battling Peter away with her hands, nearly laughing, 'Peter, _pour l'amour de djieu –_sit _down_. _Ej juré_ I am only going for the kettle, it is singing now, listen to it. Can I do nothing in this kitchen tonight but you think I shall fly away like the _rosignol_ in the song that Paul loves so much?'

'Well I don't know,' said Peter in self-defence, 'I can't make up my mind this evening as to what you are and aren't likely to do. It wasn't half a minute ago you were for vanishing into the night at no notice. As for your _rosignol_, I've never quite got the knowing of what it was, never mind what it might and mightn't be liable to do, and I don't suppose I'm likely to. Never are you more close than over those songs of yours, to be sure. Are you really staying to see to our tea? All's well with the world after all then and I'll not be interfering. I shall hand over plotting about Annunciata in all her awfulness to you and Di and promise only to offer up any strategies I might have in mind as to the best way to manage her only when you ask me,' and he meekly accepted the teacup that was passed to him by Di, Colette being then preoccupied with filling the teapot. Colette laughed her golden laugh over the sound of the tumbling water and said absent-mindedly, 'if I had known before, Peter, that I only had to think of going to be so much noticed I might have done so before.' If, as she said it, there was more than a hint of apple-spot colour to Colette's looks that was unusual with her, it was nothing that might not have been occasioned by the steam rising from the kettle.

'_Asteure_,' she said more briskly now, turning the conversation rapidly and regaining the table with strainer and teapot both, any trace of colour having fled away, 'about Annunciata, _dis-a-moi_, what will you do?'

'I do hope,' said Di accepting tea from Colette, 'you aren't seeking to be helpful. If I wasn't dreading this woman's coming before, courtesy of the pair of you, I certainly am now.'

Some of that dread must have crept into her correspondence with Ingleside because her father's next letter ran, _I meant it about that visit –if you think it will do any good my coming at the same time, you need only say the word. The more you write me about your Caro and the list you are developing of things she can and can't eat, the more intrigued I am. I'm sure I could make Christmas if I told your mother I was going for reasons of work, which would be perfectly true. If in the course of doing so I happened to see my own Di again, so much the better. What do you think? _ Di, folding the letter into quarters and slipping it into the pocket of her skirt thought that however forgiving her mother might be, Susan Baker might live on for time immemorial without ever letting the doctor forget he had gone away for Christmas and declined to eat her Christmas goose. On a whim she took out his letter again and glanced at it. She had meant to open it again and read it over, to feel again the warmth of her father's character, but her eye was caught instead by the writing on the outside; _urdonoal –grams for S. Crawford_, _P.S. Perhaps try an elimination approach with Caro, say one thing a week and note down the difference? Love as ever, _andDi laughed to see the medical bled into the personal.

They need not have worried. Christmas came and in spite of the readiness of the pudding, Christmas Cake, a platter of butterballs and another of ginger biscuits and shortbread, Aunt Annunciata did not come. A card came midway through December to say her long-time friend and neighbour was in bed with a broken leg and had no one else to nurse her –would they forgive her? Hillside found that there was nothing to forgive and its inhabitants exhaled as one. There was an ominous postscript prophesying a visit if agreeable to them (and even if not, Peter speculated darkly) in the spring and Di wrote Ingleside a letter to rival her father's in succinctness; _we are all well, you may have your Christmas treat in you own home after all_.

Instead, New Year's Eve brought Colette to them. She came running up the hill on that auspicious evening, buried up to her nose by her scarf, arms outstretched stiffly against the wind, hindered in aiding her by the thickness of her brown coat and the basket on her arm, breathless from cold and exercise. They were then all together in the kitchen, Mimi, Peter, Di, Mr. Harris, even the children, who were half drunk with sleep half nervously excited from lack of it. Peter caught the strain of Colette's approach, the sound of her breathless nattering and the lightness of her footfalls long before the others did, even over the sound of their own music-making, and putting aside the fiddle he had been playing, crossed to the kitchen door to let her in and thereby throwing her off-balance, for her hand had been going to the door-handle when he opened it. She laughed to see him there and so did the children, and she said, 'now if _I_ were to do that for _you_, they would never stop talking, _n'est-ce pas?_ Am I not right, Caro, Paul?'

'Ah but you are supposing that you would leave them enough time to talk, _colleen_,' said Peter, before anyone else could have a hope of answering and motioning Colette into the kitchen and shutting the door against the snow and the wind both in one fluid gesture. As they talked, Mimi turned to Di and raised her eyebrows, mutely issuing a question to which Di had no ready answer. Di said only, 'Honestly Peter, you make it sound as if you hardly talk at all.'

'I don't know that I'd have said I talked oftener than most people,' said Peter, so that the children, who had almost recovered from their last spasm of laughter, began again and Di and Colette looked in studied avoidance away from one another lest they join in.

'Now,' Peter went on, oblivious to the chaos he seemed to be wreaking, 'you sit down _colleen_ and I'll fetch –'

'You won't fetch anything,' said Di firmly, 'you have never known where to find anything in this kitchen and given half a moment you will go looking for the china in the pantry.'

'I'm sure I shouldn't,' said Peter with affected hurt as crossed to the china cupboard and brought out another teacup.

'But he would, would he not, Careen,' said Colette, turning to Caro and defaulting to the name she had given her in babyhood, a variant on Peter's all-purpose endearment and one that seemed to marry Caro's first and middle name to one another. Caro, who had no objection to _this_ address, gladly gave her agreement and held her arms up to Colette in the hope she would be picked up. Colette acquiesced, saying as she did so, 'that's right, _viens-icitte_, already he is talking again –the story about the combs and the watch, is it not?' and as she talked and settled Caro, Colette brought forth from the depths of her coat a parcel as she did so.

'But we've had Christmas already,' protested Laura Lee.

'_wey_ –I know, but this is for _Jour D'Année_, for tomorrow really, but you must have it now. That was always when my brothers and I had our Christmas treat. This is only _lagniappe_ –Peter you would call it a 'small minding' I think?' Somehow, in spite of having worked fully four years alongside Peter and knowing perfectly well that he would have called a little gift exactly that, Colette's inflection brought the words out in the shape of a question.

'A –yes, I expect I would _colleen_. Do you know, I'd quite forgotten about such things. It was one of Gran's phrases that one, and it's been an age since I've had cause to use it. I don't suppose you can tell me what I was talking over that I should have happened to want it?'

Colette, who had quite a long memory when she wanted it, made a show of having to remember. It would not do, she thought, to seem to remember too much of things so inconsequential as Peter's 'small mindings,' irrespective of who the phrase belonged to.

'Cherries I think, _cerises_. You brought them to Caro and I from the market, _tu te rapelles_ –do you not remember?' Peter had a vague idea that he never would have thought of cherries –or any fruit with a stone –for Caro for fear she should have choked on them in the summers Colette had lived and worked at Hillside, but after all the fuss that had come of his going to the door he had the sense not to say so. There was only so much of what Colette would call 'bother' and Di 'fuss' that Colette could reasonably be expected to tolerate. Besides, the cherries were of no interest to the others, who were still fascinated by the parcel Colette had procured some moments before and were now in the midst of unwrapping it.

'A bit like the kings then,' said Mr. Harris mildly, having taken no notice of their exchange, and dwelling still on Colette's talk of her delayed Christmas treat in childhood, 'but earlier?' Colette seemed to pause in consideration before answering, as if she had not immediately caught the allusion, or equally, Di thought, as if she were dwelling momentarily on the memory of cherries in summertime. Later she would be daring she thought, and ask about it, but not now. In any event, Colette seemed to have caught up and doubled back to the conversation of a moment ago.

'I suppose it is a little like the Kings and the Christ child, yes, I never thought before,' she said, and the world resumed its natural course of spinning. There was no further fuss or bother, and when the cuckoo on the wall burst forth to sing in the New Year, they were eating freshly made _ploye_ and white taffy from Colette's parcel, the bread having cooled only with its exposure to the outside world on the journey up to Hillside.

* * *

January saw the birth of the baby, or as it afterwards transpired, the babies that had provoked Mimi to seeking out someone to fill the void left by Colette's going. There being no one near at hand to take the children for the duration they were bundled into the kitchen and spent a cosy evening in the glow of the stove listening to the sound of Peter's fiddle, which played every cheerful thing it could think up from 'Playfair' to 'Dashing White Sergeant.' Richard took his sisters one on each arm and lead them haltingly through the steps as he understood them from Peter's way of calling.

'Round for eight and again for eight and turn right, jump left then right…' Only Peter knew what his instructions meant but it did not matter. They might tread a confused figure of eight but Laura Lee, with her hair like a flame, was a vision as she was spun about, all fire and white flannel. Caro, standing opposite her and uncertainly ghosting the steps which sounded more like crossword clues than anything else, resembled nothing so much as a finely wrought waxwork cast in darkling shadow. Di entreated Paul to dance, but he would sooner watch and so he sat encircled in her arms and beat out the rhythm of the thing upon the table while Gyp lay at Peter's feet and his tail kept time to the music, and Di sang, a thing she was not given to doing, the words of a song that belonged properly to Glen dances,

_Now the music's ready let us all begin, _

_So step it out and step it in, _

_To the merry music of the violin, _

_We'll dance the hours away…_

And she tailored the names that followed to suit the dancing children as best she could. But St. Christopher loomed grey and resolute across the mat at the base of the front door and not even cream could tempt him away. It was only when Dr. Carson could be heard to leave, without so much as looking in to say all was well, that the cat of Hillside came in and condescended to be fed, and then with a grim air of one who has triumphed over nebulous evil.

They bundled the children to sleep after that, Peter and Di between them, tucking them all four together under the log cabin quilt. It was Caro who said into the hush of that little room off of the kitchen, 'will you sing for us again?' If Di thought perhaps there had been enough music for that evening she did not say so. She had never picked up the habit of telling Caro 'no.' She sang them 'I saw three ships,' because it had been her musical inheritance from her mother and it was the thing that came first to her mind.

'You never said you sang,' Peter said almost accusingly over a cup of tea.

'I don't particularly,' she had said, cupping her hands round her teacup and thinking how late in the day it was, even as the cuckoo indicated that really they were early into 'tomorrow' by chiming four times.

'Do you not?' said Peter wonderingly, peering into the depths of his teacup as though it contained, in addition to the restoratively hot beverage, the answer to the meaning of life, 'do you not,' he repeated and getting no answer from tea or Di, 'then that's the first sin I know you to be guilty of.'

After that, he had gone out on no sleep to see to the cattle and it was left to Di to tell him over breakfast that the little boy was called 'Robert' from the first, after his father, or would have been if it hadn't been foreshortened to 'Robbie' by the children inside of half an hour. His sister though was 'the baby' for a week while the family argued over what they would call her. Mimi had been so certain it would be a boy and had so little anticipated twins that there had been no alternative name put by and everyone had their own idea of what she ought to be called. The nurse thought 'Amaryllis' suited her exactly, Mimi wanted to call her 'Rosalind,' after some long-dead and ill-remembered relative, Mr. Harris argued for 'Ruth,' and Laura Lee for 'Eloise.' Richard said she ought to be called 'Margaret,' and Caro said if they called her 'Colleen' Peter might start using her name, but Peter swore up and down that no child ought to have that for a Christian name, however much he doted on Caro, and didn't 'Dimity' suit her, given her smallness? Even if Di had wanted too, she could not have made up the difference and in the end they fell in with Mr. Harris's suggestion that they plant seeds in the garden and give the naming of the child to whoever's should come up first. Di was startled therefore, to find a sheepish Paul come into the house with the sun the morning after this plan had been executed. But he would not tell her what he was about, nor would he tell her the day after that or the one that followed it. It was only on the fourth day that he capitulated and climbing guiltily onto one of the chairs at the trestle table yielded up, 'I have pulled up Peter's plant, Di.' She looked at him curiously and he said to the floor, 'I thought dad ought to name her, you know, as it's always been mummy who has done before, so I went out and took out Richard's plant where it had shot up, and Laura Lee's, and yesterday I went out to see if Caro's had come up…but it hadn't and so it was only mine and Peter's left – ' for they had never thought much of 'Amaryllis and discounted it from the first, 'and…and…' his eyes brimmed and Di went to sit by him, hiding a smile in a yawn, for it was yet early. She was saved by Peter, who came clattering into the kitchen and said, 'a good idea too –and I had it myself Paul, it was why your Caro's seedling never came up. I wondered who else it was who was getting up with the lark to see that your father should have his choice.' Which is how it came about that it was Mr. Harris's flower that sprouted ostensibly first, and Di and Peter never breathed a word of what had happened. The little girl was called 'Ruth' and had 'Rosalind' appended for a second name to please her mother. It sounded very grand, or Caro thought it did, and they laughed afterwards when all of the fuss they had made of naming her she was never afterwards anything but 'Ruthie' by them.

Colette came up to visit with her basket in hand and brimming over with crochet and knitting for them and laughed her golden laughter for many minutes when she got to hear of it.

'All that trouble over a name,' she said, spreading her treasures out upon the trestle table for inspection.

'Have you ever known anything like it?'

'Oh I don't know,' said Di, marvelling over an intricate pattern of crosses and lilies that had somehow been knitted almost as lace into a baby's blanket, 'my family always made rather a thing of children's names –are continuing to make a thing of them to judge by my brother's letters, and none of them agrees. This though,' said Di, gesturing to the handiwork on the table, 'I have never seen before. How many hours have you given over to us?'

'Hours?' said Colette indignantly, smoothing out a delicate affair of smocking and darts, 'you are cleverer than that –I could not count the hours or the stitches, for I loved to do it. Mimi, you know, she has never had any luck with sewing, but for her quilting, and in what time would you have made such things up for her?' Di began to protest but Colette brushed her off with a wave of her sun-kissed hands.

'_Asteures,_' she said, 'this child of your brother's with so many names, what does its _maman _say?'

'I don't think she has done,' said Di smiling, 'I don't think she's been given half the chance to. Besides, time is on their side at the moment –no one need really worry until June.'

'Ah well, then he needn't worry as you say. Tell me, how is Mimi? Have you noticed?'

'What are you two talking over so thickly?' interjected Peter, entering suddenly through the kitchen door without warning.

'Di is telling me of Mimi,' said Colette, her rich and redolent voice perforce stressing the second syllable of the name and transforming it into something operatic and grandiose.

'Is it like before? _Qu'es-qu'ielle brâilles?_'

' I'm afraid you've gone and lost me, _colleen_,' said Peter apologetically, 'you'd better give it to me again in English, though there's a chance,' he added with a roguish grin, 'Gyp might have an answer ready for you. Have you Gyp?' Gyp, who unbeknownst to Colette had been asleep in the corner between the jam cupboard and the pantry, hearing his name, thumped his tail emphatically. Colette blew air over her lips, making a noise like a horse out in the cold that expressed better than anything else ever could, her indignation at such levity.

'That dog,' said Colette impatiently, 'has only a little more sense than you and not your charm. Mimi, Peter, is she unhappy again, is she crying?'

'Di says not,' said Peter, picking up a baby's blanket for closer examination, 'and she's in rather more often than I am, and so has the knowing of things like that. When did you manage all of this? Don't go telling me it's more of your small mindings, for I shan't believe you; I've not seen work like it in a long time.'

'It was your _grand-mère,_ was it not, who could have spun even a shroud for her God?'

'_Colleen_ really,' said Peter, relinquishing the blanket and busying himself filling up the kettle with water, 'one minute you tell me I talk unremarkable nonsense that even the geese wouldn't take the trouble of half remembering, and not a moment later you go on to remind me of things that _are_ nonsense that you _have_ remembered, and yet you're easily much cleverer than even uncommon geese. Never shall I know what to make of it. It's all too much.'

* * *

It was early in February that Peter and Colette's talk of Mimi came back to haunt Di. Often after that first night at Hillside had Caro crept down to the kitchen and burrowed under the log cabin quilt, seeking protection against 'It,' whatever 'It' was, that terrified her so in the dark hours of the night. And it was in February, coming away from tea and the crossword, that Di first heard the sound of weeping resound through the house. She took it for Caro's, then curled up under the quilt and guarded by St. Christopher, but when Di bent over her with a candle, Caro was dry-eyed and breathing easily. Still the sound of it persisted as though it were close at hand, and she set the candle precariously on the night-table and wrapped a shawl round her while she tried to work out who occupied the room immediately overhead. Mentally she walked the upstairs corridor; there was Richard's room with Paul, overlooking the front of the house, the vacant spare room opposite them, the girls in the room nearest to the stairs, and with a jolt it came to her that it must be Mimi overhead, that something must be wrong, terribly wrong, for her to be making a noise like that. For the sound of it, full of a soul's agony, had brought home to her the full meaning of that word Colette had sometimes used, '_brâilles_.' It certainly sounded like more than ordinary weeping. Perhaps it was one of the babies. In a moment Di had taken up the candle in it's dish and was treading gingerly upon the stairs. She did not go in but shielded the candle with a hand and hovered in the shadow of the door, which Mimi had never thought to close. By the lustre of a gibbous moon and the sliver of the open door, Di could just make the other woman out to be kneeling beside her bed; face buried at once in arms and coverlet both, her shoulders shaking with the strength of whatever emotion gripped her. Di saw her and thought,_ I cannot go in, she would never forgive me_. She went as she had come, on cat's feet and making no noise. She regained the room off of the kitchen and kneeling at the windowledge, wrote uneasily to her father in the hope that he would have some of his warm and practical advice for her. Then, climbing into bed beside Caro, she drew the little girl to her, hoping somehow to ward off the unhappiness of the other woman. Outside it began to rain and her last conscious thought was of Peter prophesying that '_if February brings no rain/ 'tis neither good for hay nor grain_.' Well, the arable would be all right if nothing else was.

The rain continued and coming as it had done after a dry but grey Candlemas, Peter ceased to worry about the conditions for the arable. But Mimi's weeping persisted, sometimes noiseless, sometimes not, and it was not, Di discovered, restricted to those candlelit hours of the day. Laura Lee would not go far from the house, as she had done all summer, but stuck close and sitting at the kitchen table worried over her mother as no girl of almost-five was meant to.

'She cried over Caro,' said Laura Lee in one of the rare intervals when her sister was out of earshot, being then in the garden picking parsley for the suppertime soup, 'but everyone always said that was because she never felt like mummy's baby –what do you think?' and Laura Lee kicked the leg of the table in her discomfort, scuffing her shoe as she did so. Under different circumstances Di might have said something in defence of the innocent shoe, but under different circumstances it was unlikely they would have been having this conversation, so she forbore to comment on the display.

'I don't know, blossom,' said Di, borrowing Peter's name for the girl and thereby earning a smile. When Laura Lee smiled she did look like a flower, Di thought, a spindly tiger lily with sun-kissed skin.

'The other day mummy said, 'they won't –they won't', what do you suppose she meant?' Laura Lee swept her hair over her shoulders where it had come loose and cast great blue eyes in Di's direction, but otherwise she showed none of her inclination towards exaggeration. It was almost curious that in this, in reiterating her mother's distress, Laura Lee should be so devoid of italics. Di turned her bread with unnecessary vigour and wondered how or if to tell this flower of a girl that her mother had been talking about her children's reluctance to be fed by her.

'I asked Peter and he said it was because mummy was tired, is that what you think it is?'

'I think,' said Di, who thought really Peter had given the only sensible answer available, 'it must be a lot of work to look after so many children at once, don't you?' She was thinking too of the percentage tables that Peter and Colette had used to feed Caro, but that was something to ask Peter –and her father –about later.

'Ye-es,' said Laura Lee, beginning to trace a pattern on the trestle table. Then, in that heady voice she borrowed from her mother, 'should I help her do you think? Should I help mummy?'

'In some things perhaps,' said Di, setting the bread by to prove and sending Laura Lee out to investigate where her brothers had got to. She herself went in search of Mimi, alarmed that Laura Lee should so astutely read her mother's mood. But then, she thought, weren't children meant to be like that? Hadn't she sensed as a little girl how Aunt Mary Maria had nettled her own mother, and how worried her father had been over her before Rilla was born? There was after all nothing so unusual about it.

But she did not forget the percentage charts, and Peter went so far as to unearth them. They were weird and cryptic, written in almost illegible measures, and when her father's letter came, it contained not a more enlightening explanation but an anxious injunction; _if you must use the percentages method, take great care those children get lots of fruit, won't you? They will be cheated of all sorts of vitamins otherwise –which reminds me, you _are_ giving Caro more than her share where fruit is concerned, aren't you? She was brought up on those charts and I think it would do her good. I know you are in blackberry country, but I shall see to it that you are sent some of our cherries when the time is right, and plums to, if I say a word to your brother, I'm sure he will see you have some of them, and some of the rosehips from the garden, and… and…and…_ it seemed there was a whole list of things to be had from Glen St. Mary when spring came, and Gilbert Blythe was obviously as thrilled at the prospect of sending them as any young boy is over Christmas. Then lastly, _of course, citrus things are best, lemons and limes and things –you know what I mean. I'll be sure to put some your way if I come across any._

Meantime, Laura Lee had taken Di at her word and in spite of her fifth birthday only beginning to loom into view, she was perpetually to be seen with little Robbie in her arms, so that Di wrote one night by candle-light, some weeks later, _I begin to wonder if I said the right thing to Laura Lee. She is devoted to Robbie, and he to her, or as devoted as a two-months baby can be, but it's almost unnerving to see her with him –I happened upon her giving him a bath the other day looking as 'knacky' (Susan's word, not mine) at it as Rilla ever did with Jims, and Laura Lee not yet school-aged. Caro and I have Ruthie whenever her mother hasn't, which is oftener than you'd think. It might interest you, I don't know, to hear I found her –Mimi that is – the other day crying over those babies –Laura Lee was for once off on the sort of ramble girls that age are made for going on and I'd been making a crumble and trying simultaneously to get Gyp out of the larder when Caro found me out and said, 'won't you go look in on mummy?' I did, and she had Ruthie in her lap and they were both in tears...and she kept saying 'it's just like last time, it's happened all over again.' It made me think of Colette asking if it was 'like last time.' Those were just the words she used too. I wasn't here then, but I know enough to know things _aren't_ like that. It wasn't that Caro couldn't be nursed, it was that the doctor said she shouldn't be. In any event, Mimi was so beside herself that I took out Colette's percentages tables again and tried very hard to work them out, but I had no luck and I'm reluctant to use them anyway because I know how against it dad is. But if this keeps up… _

The cuckoo clock struck noon, and Paul, whose week it was to ring the dinner bell, and who had been watching the arms on the clock face as a cat does a mouse, could be heard to ring it with much gusto. Di left off writing and went to see to serving and sitting down to dinner, putting to one side for the time being the troubles of Mimi and the babies.


End file.
